Bare Bones Software BBEdit 9

If BBEdit is bare bones, then Fat Albert is supermodel skinny. The versatile text editor can do so many things, we think it may contain some sort of alien technology. Bare Bones Software’s latest update, BBEdit 9, may well be the ultimate toolbox for coding on a Mac.

When we say text editor, of course, we are talking about a hugely different category from the word processors that “normal people” use. You won’t find fancy fonts, templates, or glitzy charts; instead, you will find color-coding, line numbers, and pure, unadulterated, text (exciting stuff, right?). Back in the olden days, programmers swore by vi or Emacs, but GUI’d text editors have introduced so much functionality that you wonder sometimes whether you’re writing the code or the app is. BBEdit’s feature set is enormous, and some might call the app the gold standard of text editing.

BBEdit does everything--it’s difficult to pick out a killer feature, besides the sheer level of control you get over, well, the features. If you, for example, write more HTML than anything else, you can customize the color scheme of the code, create a custom set of text clippings that you can insert via keyboard shortcuts, and write scripts (in almost any scripting language) that manipulate your code in any way, shape, or form. But HTML is just an example. The same functionality (and more) is available for almost any language you can program in. You can build profiles for each language, essentially facilitating different programming environments, all within the same text editor. Better yet, if your language isn’t supported out of the box, BBEdit has provided an SDK to developers, and there are a ton of language modules available for free.

BBEdit can tame your code demons easily.

We harp on the coding, because, really, that’s what BBEdit is designed for. Don’t expect to write your novel in it, a task much better suited to Pages or MS Word. BBEdit’s advanced features are all code-centric. BBEdit offers full read/write capabilities to FTP/SFTP servers and has a Preview In Browser button to check quick code tweaks, not only on your Mac, but in Windows browsers via VMware. It has built-in commands to compile and run code in Terminal, as well as check for syntax errors within the editor itself. It’s incredibly easy to organize and manage projects, as you can group several files and create a project file for easy access.

BBEdit also offers some other text gymnastics that are pretty great. One of our favorites is multifile Find and Replace. This is useful if you want to change a block of text, hyperlinks, or function names across different files, all at once. Under the same umbrella, version tracking is an easy affair, as you can compare documents handily with a simple command. You can also put to-do tracking in your documents, to maintain records of ongoing changes--or merely write obnoxious remarks in colleagues’ code. Autocomplete rounds out the big-ticket items, with a drop-down menu for every word or character that you type. While it sounded great in theory, the execution often disappointed. Not only was it slow (making it useless unless you just want to look up a variable or function name), but also, when it auto-closed HTML tags, it messed up, with <li becoming the syntactically incorrect <<li> </li>.

BBEdit impresses 95 percent of the time: It's speedy, feature-complete, and extensible, though a bit expensive for everyone but the most dedicated coders. We just wish Autocomplete was more useful and accurate.